Private Project

Pari - Preview

Pari attempts to describe an event in the days of Pari and Praveen, a violent rupture that allowed in a life held by desire and not duty. In this film, they recount their love story against the undertones and backdrop of threat and violence. The present is both fraught and romantic; the disruption of a past moment finds momentary comfort in recall; the future is hopeful.

  • Priya Sen
    Director
  • Rough Edges
    Producer
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Pari
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Gender
  • Runtime:
    30 minutes 27 seconds
  • Country of Origin:
    India
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    Hindi
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Habitat Film Festival
    New Delhi
    India
    May 7, 2024
    Official Selection
  • 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala
    Thiruvananthapuram
    India
    Official Selection
Distribution Information
  • Rough Edges
    Distributor
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Priya Sen

Priya Sen is an independent filmmaker and artist who works across film & video, sound, and installation. Her work explores forms for tenuousness and ambiguity within realist documentary and simultaneously plays with narrative modes and cinematic gestures. She is interested in eclectic, itinerant and egalitarian film forms
and the manners of presence that accompany each work. With an MA from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and an MFA from Temple University, Philadelphia, Sen has taught and facilitated nonfiction and experimental film and video practice in various institutions and social contexts. Her films have screened at festivals and venues that include Forum Expanded Berlinale, BFI London Film Festival, Dharamshala International Film Festival, IDSFFK Kerala, Outfest LA, Bangalore Queer Film Festival, Kochi Biennale, Experimenta, and IAWRT among others. She is a 2023-24 Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I have known Pari and Praveen for a few years. I met Pari towards the end of a film I was shooting with Praveen, “Yeh Freedom Life”, in 2017. In 2022, Pari left her family and three adult children to be with Praveen. She had been married at the age of fourteen. Twenty five years later she walked out of her home in Delhi’s Ambedkar
Nagar, leaving an abusive and shattered husband, a family and extended family she had tended to and served with care and resentment, and three children who could not bear the shame.

Pari did not realize that walking out of her marriage and into her lover’s home, meant a trail of criminal and legal proceedings over the next many weeks, that had nothing to do with the love that had given her the courage to do this. What followed is what this film attempts to re-tell, 3 years after the event. Pari and Praveen wanted to be able to film this retelling. This 30min piece tries to describe this moment of rupture in their lives, but ultimately one that gave them the freedom to live with each other and choose a life that was held by desire rather than duty.

I have known Pari through these years and I have sensed her pain at having left her children. On the other hand she has totally embraced this new life she has with Praveen. This film brings out constant and casual violence through which families try to protect their honour, and the strength of love and desire that can stand up to it. After a violent series of events in 2022 that involved her family harming and kidnapping her, we filed a habeas corpus at the Delhi High Court. The court ruled in favour of Pari’s decision to live her life the way she wanted to, with whoever she wanted to live with. She has not met her family and children since.